This is a space for criticism, critique and meta-commentary.
Este es un espacio personal para la crítica y el meta-comentario.
“The dialectical critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate. Only then does he/she do justice to his/her object and to him/herself”.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’

Páginas

5/23/2007

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Casco Issues X on Wednesday 23 May, with a new performance, ‘Affecting Abstraction, Part Three’ by Falke Pisano.
Edited by Basque writer/curator Peio Aguirre and Casco’s director, Emily Pethick, Casco Issues X addresses the question of methodology in artistic practice, thinking about the presence or absence of methods, their ideological connotations and historical backgrounds, in order to examine some of the conditions that surround contemporary art production.

To think about method implies a reflection on the working procedures that all of us employ in our activities, and the – hidden or visible – processes that enable something to come into being. Where as in science the rules of investigation, steps and techniques of analysis and knowledge are very established, these days could one speak of one (or many) defined artistic methods in contemporary cultural practices?

Falke Pisano’s ‘Affecting Abstraction, Part Three’ explores the possibility of implementing a human presence in a hermetic abstract construction of language by performatively outlining how this could be achieved.

Casco Issues X: The Great Method is made possible by the generous support of the Mondriaan Foundation, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and Gemeente Utrecht. Available through Casco and Revolver (www.revolver-books.de).

5/06/2007

Welcome to the cities of architects, welcome to the cities of politicians

This image comments my previous post (like a meta-commentary of it). This is a rather a recent image from the area of Bilbao, a picture taken (and appropriated) from the newspaper El País. The article was about the new Isozaki towers. But the polemis has been other: that about architect Santiago Calatrava complaining about the "new addition" to his own "arty" bridge... There has been a trial and it seems Calatrava is winning against Bilbao's city council.

This is an image I got from artist Jakob Kolding allready time ago. It features the public Jorge Oteiza's sculpture which stands in front of the town hall. Entitled "Variante ovoide de desocupación de la esfera" (2002), this monumental sculpture serves here as the principal motive for a promotional campaign of multinational clothing brand Carhartt. The sculpture holds a young man skating and there is also another hip cool guy passing by there. Of course these alements are artifically added to the image like in a kind of collage. In fact, it might be also a Jakob Kolding artwork in itself, but it is not. Rather it is as if someone from the design section of the company will follow Kolding's art. The background of the image also contains meaningfull information: this photograph is taken just before the construction of the two highrises by Arata Isozaki. The derricks are visible and somehow periodize the image of Bilbao, inmersed since more than a decade in an ininterrupted and endless renewal process. But it also comments Jakob Kolding's own work, like the posters he made in 2003 for D.A.E. Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak, one of then featuring a similar collage, street-skaters standing in front of another sculpture by Jorge Oteiza in San Sebastian. (Another detail represents a skater in Chillida's "Comb of the Winds"). All this reminds a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum in Autumm 2004, when showing the Kolding's collages and other contemporary "uses" of Basque myths such Oteiza, some architects felt irritated of such irrespetous treatments. Those architects are supposed to protect the meaning of ancient art, and they are blind to the fact that old art serves today for city branding and promotional campaigns of multinational brands.